Whats the right way to request details for helping to solve a problem

Question

Because some of you have such detailed ideas how to help OPs (and especially how not) and some of you like to express this by waves of downvotes (even if th OP accepted the answer) I want to ask you for the (your) right way to do things:

Often it is necessary to get much more information from the OP and, thats the key, it is also necessary to guide she/he to collect such information. Therefore it used to be required to ask the OP to execute commands and to post the result, to ask to execute another command and to get the result and so on. Guiding to run commands using comments is often not clearly for the OP and to get the result that way may also not.

Here is an example of such a situation.

So what is the better & desired way while omit useing answers?

And, interesting too, what should be the follow up, if the answer / solution was found in the melee of the comments? Should somebody extract an answer of them an create an answer? Or should other user which the same question being dept to read all the comments to extract the answer her/himself?

Answer 1

My method:

Ask for results of instructions in comment and ask them to put the results into the question. When done remove the comment.

If it needs more than just 1 comment ask the user to join into chat. If the user has less than 20 rep I tend to upvote some of the questions so that user can (but do not forget to remove them if the questions are not that good). Or if that is not possible tell them to get 20 rep and then PM before entering chat.

Answer 2

if the answer / solution was found in the melee of the comments? Should somebody extract an answer of them an create an answer?

When I see an answer in the comments, I ask the user who solved the issue in comments to convert it to an answer, they solved it and should get the votes and rep for solving it.

You should not take someone else's comment and post it as an answer yourself except in extreme cases like the account is deleted or the user is not active for a few months, but do tick the community wiki check box below the answer as otherwise you will get downvotes fast, even if you get accepted, as users will just think you took someone else's comment and used it for your own gain.

Because some of you have such detailed ideas how to help OPs (and especially how not) and some of you like to express this by waves of downvotes (even if th OP accepted the answer)

Can you give an example of what you mean here?

Only the very worst answers receive a "wave of downvotes", you seem to be implying that if someone does not like an answer they get others to vote it down but I am sure that is not what you mean, right?